[woodsyi]

Syracuse and Pitt leaves Big East for ACC.  TAMU is already accepted at SCC.  Oklahoma and Texas boards of trustees are meeting Monday to discuss their respective futures.  It's clearly driven by football money but basketball and Olympic sports are affected too.  Syracuse Lax to ACC makes it a sick conference.

Care to guess the new landscape?

[macrojack]

To hell with traditional rivalries, geographical groupings and historical perspective. There's money to be made.
Never mind that colleges and universities, in an effort to create well-rounded and thoroughly complete young men, introduced sports as a peripheral to the education these schools were created to provide. Competitions between schools evolved as way to generate interest through rivalry and school pride. Then came TV and sports networks. Then came huge purses and quietly paid athletes. Agents appeared and appearances became deceptive and the mantra throughout sports was: if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.

I heard Tony Hornkaiser mention an interesting comment from Steve Spurrier that college football players should all receive $120,000/year for playing the game. From there he opined that the teams could just tell the NCAA to go screw, form their own leagues and arrange their own television contracts.

The idea is refreshing in its honesty. Right now the self delusion we have to employ to convince ourselves that these are "student athletes" borders on hallucination. Friendly competition doesn't lead to poisoning trees and setting fires, does it?

I can't provide a topo of the new landscape but I fear it will be very polluted.

[JLM]

I've always liked Spurrier's honesty.  The NCAA is a facade for money.  Until the players properly (whatever that means) compensated, they'll leave early and continue to be tempted to do the stupid things young people have always done, especially when everyone around them are reaping millions of of them.

It been bugging me that the Big 10 has been 11 for years and now 12, but they don't rename.  Maybe now that the Big 12 is basically no more it'll happen.

IMO the ideal conference is geographically defined and limited to 8 "schools" so football teams can play everyone else.  The best alternate is the 6/6 arrangement the SEC uses.

[macrojack]

When will the virtual conference be formed? The University of Phoenix and DeVry University and Argosy University are entities created for the sole purpose of accessing government provided student financing through Pell Grants and other forms of student aid. Why should they be prevented from having access to all of the lucre available to big time football programs? Logic suggests that the owners and/or investors who created these institutions of higher learning would have both the financial wherewithal and amusement proclivities to field competitive teams. Just because there is no centralized student body or actual campus, doesn't mean they should be excluded from the camaraderie, conviviality and conspiracy that other student bodies are allowed to support.

Maybe this hasn't happened yet because the schools in question don't yet have school nicknames like Sooners, Hokies or Aggies and ,worse, don't have mascots.